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Monthly Archives: July 2017

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What do when you’ve spent 5 hours in the desert sun building a home dome only to discover that your camp mate forgot to bring the skin? Or you lost your hot date on Burn Night and you can’t find your friends anywhere? Or you just get a case of those dusty blues that creep in the morning after you’ve one (or ten) cocktails too many?

Easy, you just pull out your TAP and voila! No mas saddo. Wait, what’s a Tap? Tapping (aka EFT) is a technique you can use to relax your heart and mind in any situation, and master EFT teacher and veteran burner Sonya Sophia created this Tap just for us. Watch it now so you have a Tap ready to whip out at a moment’s notice when the rubber hits the dust. Or when the shit hits the Man. Or…you get it.

Over the last 10 years, Sonya Sophia has shared the gift of tapping with more than 20,000 Burners in workshops on the playa. This year, you can find her Tues-Sat 2-4pm at Red Lightning (8:15 & Esplanade). She is the founder of the Sophia School of Living Arts and the host of the weekly interactive online healing event the World Tapping Circle.

Take this technique with you and you may indeed find yourself floating high in the dusty twilight—clear head, light heart, and ready for ANYTHING the playa could possibly bring.
xoxoooOnelove

Picture New York City, Christmas Eve night, Bellevue Hospital. 60 people hospitalized over the course of the evening, with another 23 hospitalized from drug poisoning within the next 48 hours. With 8 dead by the time the smoke cleared, it sounds like a news story you’ve heard every week this year coming out of some distraught community in Ohio or Connecticut or Georgia? It’s got to be a bad batch of fentanyl? Maybe some spiked heroin or morphine that no one saw coming. It was actually alcohol and the year was 1926. As the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1927:

“Normally, no American government would engage in such business. … It is only in the curious fanaticism of Prohibition that any means, however barbarous, are considered justified.” Others, however, accused lawmakers opposed to the poisoning plan of being in cahoots with criminals and argued that bootleggers and their law-breaking alcoholic customers deserved no sympathy. “Must Uncle Sam guarantee safety first for souses?”~The Chemist’s War (Deborah Blum, 2/19/2010 Slate.com)

Returning to the History of Addiction series this week, I’m going to be exploring one of the lesser known eras of adulterated drugs in world history, Prohibition-era America. While it’s widely known that alcohol was still available during Prohibition, we have a romanticized idea of what this was like, with the speakeasy culture, Al Capone and flappers dominating our vision of it. The reality of bathtub gin and moonshine had some dangerous facets that we don’t talk about, that even continue to this day in places like Russia. This ties directly to the continued prohibition/unaffordable nature of scheduled substances.

Some high drama going down in the British Columbia Burning Man Community, again.

They just had their BITF (Burn In The Forest) party, in the middle of a state-wide total fire ban and a State of Emergency where 45,000 people have been displaced from their homes by wild fires in the last few days.

Organizer Krystal says (I’m paraphrasing) “there is a total fire ban every year, the fire chief and local tribe chief both approved our burn, so this is a non-issue”

Long time community member Jackson Smith points out that in past years, they had decided not to burn due to community sensitivities, and had discussed the issue as a community. This year the process appears to have changed, with some hints that a move to the local indigenous reservation may be making it easier to burn.

When do local sensitivities matter? I would think “all the time”, but sadly Burners leave trash and cause problems in many local towns. The “Leave no trace” rule at the Black Rock City event leads to overflowing trash bins in Reno.

Are the Ten Principles just marketing, something to pay lip service to as the corporations sell the tickets and bank the cash? There’s nothing in them about helping communities around the Temporary Autonomous Zone, anyway.

Here is the essence of the question raised. Are we there for ourselves, or are we there to spread Burner culture to the local community?

Great question. Are the Ten Principles only for the event, or does it matter how Burners interact with the Default world? Is the point of all this hedonism, or making the world a better place?

Still, Safety Third, right? Sucks for them, but what you gonna do? There’s fun to be had, and occult rituals to be done. Party up!

This is the official statement on the BITF situation from the event organizer.

Sounds reasonable, right? They consulted with local authorities, the fire chief and the tribe chief said “burn”, so they burned. What’s the problem?

Well, I wasn’t there speaking to the local community about their feelings. We have to rely on multiple accounts from concerned Burners – all of which, of course, were dismissed by the organizers who are trying to bring any questioning offline. Did they learn that in spin class at Esalen or the GLC?

Here are some highlights from the Facebook discussion, I’ll spare you the endless back and forth. Simon Saxomasaurus appears to be the decision-maker. His reasoning for being insensitive to the local disaster and for wanting to stop public discussion and only answer questions by private message? “I’m just a big meanie”. Ok then. There’s nothing in the Ten Principles about Big Meanies, other than that “Radical Inclusion” means you have to let serial killers and child molesters in just as much as Kardashians and Jersey Shore frat bros.